Pesticide-Free Soil Project
What is the Pesticide-Free Soil Project?
Our Reach … since 2019
What’s New with the PFSP?
The PFSP has a long-term commitment to prepare young people to become leaders and lifelong social justice activists and specifically to grow the campaign and movement to end pesticide use on the Central Coast.
“I’ve learned a lot about leadership and taking initiative. Not just gardening experience, but I REALLY wanted experience with team cooperation. I am grateful that I got all of these things.”
“What I have learned from PFSP that will stick with me is learning how to plan events like the Other Strawberry Festival and coordinate with other community groups.”
“Organizing the Other Strawberry Festival was the highlight of my work this year. It was meaningful because it allowed me to connect with my community more.”
This fall, we continue two organizing campaigns and our learning and service partnership with the Rio School District regenerative farm.
- Drift Campaign: We are working with students and staff at Rio Mesa High School building a coalition to address pesticide exposure in the form of drift from nearby agricultural fields. Organizing at the high school will be led by PFSP interns, especially those who attend the school and have seen and/or experienced first-hand the effects on student health. Our campaign strategies will include making pesticide drift visible through presenting in classes using our interactive play, Drift, which leads to discussion, information sharing, and creating an action plan for the school to reduce pesticide exposure.
We will engage students, staff, families, and other community members with ongoing meetings and opportunities to participate in actions such as petitions, visiting key decision-makers to express opinions, making public comments, and planning for drift mitigation strategies including strategic plantings.
- The Other Strawberry Festival (OSF): Youth leaders from various high schools, colleges, communities, and identities have built relationships of mutual support and have educated each other about their specific activist concerns. This Youth Coalition is taking taken ownership of the OSF event, reflecting their understanding of community needs and actions around environmental justice in the strawberry-growing industry.
In Spring 2026, we would like to host this event as an in-person gathering that will celebrate community, showcase youth artwork, and provide a space for imagining possibilities. The youth will perform a participatory play which tells a local youth’s story about going to a school which is surrounded by conventional agricultural fields. The aim of this play is to discuss the impacts of pesticides on our communities and to imagine working towards pesticide-free zones on and around school campuses, reducing toxic pesticide exposure for students. The Other Strawberry Festival will be a collaborative project with local youth groups from MICOP and CAUSE.
Rio Regenerative farm: The PFSP’s collaboration with the Rio School District now includes support for the interns’ service-learning at the Rio Regenerative Farm. It is a groundbreaking farm, a 10-acre site devoted to both education and production for the district’s school cafeterias. PFSP interns helped farmer Edgar Espinoza with the initial crop plantings, fertilizing, irrigating, and more in fall 2023. We continue to learn from Edgar and Stephanie Towner, Garden and Nutrition Educator for the Rio School District as we help the Rio Regenerative Farm in its mission to bring local, pesticide-free food and education to the Rio School District.
UPDATE, November 1: The spirit of collaboration came alive today during our Día de los Muertos celebration at Rio Regenerative Farm, a free community gathering for students, families, and neighbors.
The Pesticide-Free Soil Project performed DRIFT, an original theater piece inviting us to reflect on the spraying of chemicals around schools and to imagine healthier, safer ways forward. It was a powerful day—filled with beauty, connection, and deepening roots for everyone who took part.
Highlights from Spring 2025
This spring PFSP youth and staff have worked closely with members of Tequio and CAUSE youth groups to plan for the first in-person Other Strawberry Festival. The festival is meant to be in conversation with the agricultural industry-led “Strawberry Festival” by creating a space for farmworkers, their families, and communities to share about the realities of the strawberry-growing industry. Topics will include labor conditions, pesticide exposure, and food deserts, along with native plants, art about environmental justice, and an interactive performance of PFSP’s play, “Drift.” The event will also include action steps towards changing the conditions for the better.
Planning has been truly youth-led and is an ongoing process of brainstorming, narrowing down options, figuring out action steps, and forming youth-led committees: Logistics/Outreach, Workshops/Food, and Art/Music. This is a collaborative community event for youth to attend and learn. Workshops will include a garden tour that situates Community Roots Garden as part of a movement to disrupt food deserts; a native plant foraging workshop led by Mini Nature Reserve; cooking workshops using local, organic food by PFSP; and the performance of “Drift” our play about pesticide-drift from agricultural fields to nearby schools. There will be an art show including local artists’ work on environmental justice and a performance by local bands. The festival will be in Oxnard on Saturday, June 14 in the afternoon. *Unfortunately, this event had to be cancelled because of intensive ICE activity in Ventura County.
“This opportunity has allowed me to start viewing land differently. I’ve grown to care for the environment more and in turn the community. The land and our communities are not two different things but rather I learned we must nurture one to cause a positive impact to the other.” — Ashley
“My work with PFSP has impacted my educational and career goals. Since joining PFSP, I have learned a lot about the effects of pesticides, food system issues, and farm work, and it has made me interested to pursue a career in plant and soil health.” — Sarahi
Our motto for this year’s work is: “Get pesticides off our campuses, cafeterias, and surrounding landscapes!” We’ll deepen our focus on supporting schools in the Rio District on these three levels, as well as providing peer-led workshops about anti-pesticide advocacy to the community at large. We’ll keep using arts-based organizing strategies as much as possible, going on engaging educational field trips, and getting to know the place and communities we live with on new levels.
Highlights include:
- Hands-on regenerative farming experiences at the Rio Regenerative Farm
We continue to learn from local leaders about regenerative ways to build soil, grow food, and create increased food security in our communities.
- Collaborating with Tequio and CAUSE’s Oxnard-based youth groups for the 2025 Other Strawberry Festival
Planning has been truly youth-led and is an ongoing process of brainstorming, narrowing down options, figuring out action steps, and forming youth-led committees.
- Drift: An Interactive Play About Pesticides in Our Communities
The play’s Theater of the Oppressed format allows audience members to practice intervening in the story, how they might make a change, and generate new solutions to collective problems.
- Advocacy at the local, state and national levels
We continue our work with teachers and students to ask the Rio District School Board to formalize the pesticide-free landscape policy and to integrate more pesticide-free food in the cafeteria that serves thousands of meals each month as the official district-wide policy.
We will also continue to work with statewide and national organizations aimed at pesticide reduction.
Interested in organizing a Compost Tea Party at your school or other community space?
PFSP staff and interns, in collaboration with the Rio School District and participating local organizations, have created a video that takes a step-by-step approach to how to organize a compost tea party at your school or in your community. The Compost Tea Party, a collaborative event with the Rio School District and local community organizations that not only takes the first step in moving away from using pesticides on school grounds but also provides workshops on nature-based climate solutions, addressing both farmworker and family health, soil health and climate change. This video was made possible by funding from the Cal EPA and shows how to replicate this successful project. Click on the image to view.
We also created an “Introduction to the Compost Tea Party” video designed for the school children at the host school. This video gives a short introduction to the Compost Tea Party and why it is important for soil health and holding carbon and inviting their participation in the event. We made an English version and a Spanish version, to be used at the discretion of the teacher.
Background on PFSP
Compost tea party.
In 2019, the Ventura County Pesticide-Free Soil Project (PFSP) evolved from a collaboration with EFC alums, local schools and community-based organizations shining a light on the issue of pesticide-use at school sites and its impact on people in the surrounding neighborhoods.
A core of local EFC alums plus 2020 Encampers are engaged in more training and organizing experience in conjunction with our organizational partners: Pesticide Action Network (PAN), Californians for Pesticide Reform, the Abundant Table, El Rio School District, Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), the Public Health Institute, and the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE).
PFSP’s “Compost Tea Parties” started the process of creating the first – and second – pesticide-free schools on the Oxnard Plain, which immediately helped improve soil and air quality for the surrounding community. That area has one of the highest pollution levels in the state, due to pesticide use. Several off-shoots, including an online nature-based climate solutions curriculum project and the “Heal the Earth” initiative, launched by third graders, are also the result of the PFSP initiative.
Due to COVID-19, the EFC pivoted to make the summer intensive virtual and activities in Ventura County safe for the young people and the other community members.
Under the leadership of Florencia Ramirez, PFSP Director, the PFSP continued during the spring and summer of 2020. PFSP responded particularly to COVID-19 by working with projects and initiatives addressing food insecurity, pesticides, farmworker health and policy work on the use of pesticides in Ventura County and throughout the state of California.
We have a stipended year-round internship program, under the direction of Juna Rosales Muller. We work with recent EFC alums from Ventura County to provide them with hands-on experience in organizing, engaging other youth, and deepening and expanding their leadership skills. These young people are often working two to three jobs, in addition to attending high school or college, and COVID-19 means layoffs for even those low-paying positions. Being able to offer stipends ensures that the young people have the support to work on the issues that affect their lives.
- This year the interns trained in regenerative agriculture and organic farming at The Abundant Table. Specifics include carrying out farm-based activities, such as working with plants, produce, tools, soil, seeds and irrigation; participating in training sessions onsite, such as lectures, demonstrations and workshops; and interacting with Abundant Table members and partner organizations, such as the Rodale Institute (socially distant, outdoors, masks on.)
- They also worked on the ARC project of the Public Health Institute, collaborating with ARC staff on a survey of South Oxnard parks in predominantly farmworker neighborhoods to understand the quality and conditions. The PFSP interns live in these communities. This mobilizing effort is in concert with a larger ARC focus on heat illness prevention for farmworkers in light of a changing climate, which includes looking at shade access in parks within primarily farmworker neighborhoods. PFSP interns recently presented some of their findings and recommendations to the city of Oxnard parks commission where they proposed a city-wide policy change to improve parks in low-income farmworker areas.
- They developed a social media environmental justice social media campaign on Instagram and Facebook with a growing following. They used what they were learning as a springboard to discuss concepts such as climate change, carbon sequestration, soil health, human health, farmworker health, pesticide use and water scarcity, as well as illuminating a path forward.
- They were featured in a 15-minute video giving an overview of the PFSP project as part of the 2021 Santa Barbara Virtual Earth Day.
- This August, the PFSP interns and staff participated in a field week learning about environmental justice. They spent each morning at a local park exploring topics that included land access, racialization, economic relationships, pesticides, and case studies of environmental injustice. Each afternoon, they traveled to field sites throughout Ventura and Santa Barbara counties to see working examples of alternative relationships to land and community being modeled by local businesses, community groups, and nonprofits. PFSP Summer Update 2021
- The PFSP continues to organize with district teachers and their students to ask the School Board to formalize the pesticide-free landscape policy as the official district-wide policy.
- When COVID-safe, we will resume the Compost Tea Parties — aiming for at least two this year.
Click to watch interview on Instagram.
Yesenia, one of our Pesticide-Free Soil Project interns, explains why she cares about pesticide-free soil in this Instagram post. She’s coming to you from the Rodale Institute no-till pumpkin patch at the Abundant Table in Camarillo, CA.
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During the first month, I learned about different food systems and regenerative agriculture …
… as well as the negative health and environmental impacts of conventional farming as opposed to organic farming. I’ve learned a lot about the negative impact that COVID-19 has made on farmworker communities and the health inequities that these communities have to endure.